Planters Punchlines
Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield
May 2014
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEXT MEETING – PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL DATE, TIME AND
LOCATION
Monday May 11, 5:30 pm @ Tony Sanders house @ 281 Garden
Street, Wethersfield. (Rain Date – if
Plant Sale is rain delayed, then this is rescheduled for May 18)
Reminisce about sale. Pick from
the leftovers for your own use or as a really cheap belated Mother’s Day
present. Hot dogs, beer & soda will
be available.
Donate some perennials from your personal collection to
the Plant Sale
Plants should be split and potted ASAP to look good for
the sale. Please label all plants.
Contact Fred Odell (860.529.6064) for official pots and plant labels.
Plant Sale Saturday May 9th (Rain Date May 16th)
7:00 - 9:00 Set Up Deliver homegrowns, unload plants, price
plants, set up tables
9:00 - 1:00 Sell Help customers, total up sales, answer
questions
1:00 - 2:00 Close Clean
up, break down tables, pack up leftover plants
Volunteer! Contribute
your own “homegrowns”
President Tony Sanders will make the “go or no go” rain
decision and get the word out.
Weston Rose Garden
The Rose Garden was opened on April 15. Tim, Tim, Howard, John, James, Fred, Ernie,
Richard & Jim weeded and cut deadwood.
This year each club member is asked to volunteer to maintain one of the
small plots on their own schedule. A
plan of the garden will be at the plant sale & May meeting for signing
up. More volunteers mean less work for
each one. This is the club’s major civic
volunteer effort – please participate!
Annual Picnic
The annual Club Picnic will be held on Monday, June 1st,
on the grounds (and porch) of The Solomon Welles House, from 5:30 until 8:00
pm. More to come.
Compostable Matter
By Jim Meehan
The trouble
with Creeping Charlie is that it doesn't really creep, like e.g. fog moving in
onto the marshland. Instead it seems to randomly hop around, landing here in
the midst of a hosta bed, there along the edge of a newly formed perennial
garden, and there again winding through a pile of leftover paving stones
stacked in the backyard.
If it acted
more like a well brought up ground cover and less like fast-moving guerilla
greenery then maybe, just maybe, it might be thought as more of a flower and
less of a weed.
Taxonomically
it is known as "Glechoma hederacea". But like most criminals this
aromatic, perennial, evergreen creeper of the mint family goes under a series
of aliases many of them representing attempts to pose as a law-abiding,
tax-paying, contributing member of plant society.
It was called
Alehoof or Tunhoof while being used by the early Saxons to clarify their beers.
"The plant also acquired the name of Gill from the French guiller (to
ferment beer), but as Gill also meant 'a girl,' it came also to be called
'Hedgemaids'".
Because of the
shape and size of its leaf it is a.k.a. as "catsfoot". And, for no
apparent reason, it is also called "Creeping Jenny".
But most
gardeners simply know it as ground ivy and expend a lot of time, energy, and an
occasional shot of "Roundup" to eradicate it from their landscape.
Mars and I have spent the past several years working with an organic lawn care
company to eliminate it from the lawn portion of our property. It is in fact
the principal reason that we began to do more for our grass that simply mowing
it.
A
representative of the business had spoken at garden club about the dangers and
downsides of chemical landscaping (which we did not do), and the benefits to
both the grass and the environment of an organic approach (which was what I
pretended I was doing by doing nothing).
At about the
same time Mars noticed that portions of the lawn were no longer lawn, but
instead medium-sized carpets of irregular green leaves and funnel shaped
flowers -- not quite wall-to-wall, but getting there. A Master Gardener friend
of ours identified it as ground ivy in a tone of voice that I interpreted as a
horticultural death knell.
Now, after
numerous applications of corn meals, glutens, foul-smelling fish byproducts,
and mysterious "teas", "Charlie" has crept out of the grass
and rejuvenated itself along the edges of and inside each of our perennial
beds.
There, because
of the density and vigor of its competition, it is no longer able to establish
a carpet, or even a small area rug. Instead, like Al-Qaeda, it pops up in a
seemingly random series of isolated pockets of resistance. And, like that
organization, the elimination of one terrorist cell has utterly no effect on
the rest.
It is a
never-ending, ground-based, hand-to-hand struggle.
It is why I love
gardening so much.
‘Seed libraries’ try to save the world’s plants
By Kevin Hartnett bostonglobe.com
A basic
principle of any library is that you return what you take out. By that
standard, the new scheme at Hampshire College’s library is a roll of the dice.
Since last November, librarians have been lending out packets of seeds,
allowing people to plant them, and checking them back in if—and only if—the
borrower manages to grow thriving plants in the meantime.
The Hampshire
College project is part of a small but growing group of “seed libraries” across
the country, local centers that aim to promote heirloom gardening and revive a
more grass-roots approach to seed breeding.
The
circulating-library model might seem like a strange fit with gardening. When
you check out books and DVDs, you’re supposed to bring them back so others can
use them, but with seeds, there’s a strong chance nothing will come back at
all. And, in a world where fruit and vegetable seeds are available for just a
few dollars a packet, free seeds aren’t a pressing need most places.
But libraries
have another goal as well, archiving and preserving knowledge. On this front,
seed libraries see themselves as an important part of a bigger movement, to
bring the issue of global plant diversity down to the community level, where
many believe it belongs.
The
agribusiness model has given the world cheap, abundant food, but it has also
reduced the variety of crops we eat to a handful of massively grow-able
varieties. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost over the last
century as farmers have moved to high-yielding, genetically modified seeds.
This dependence on a few kinds of plants leaves our food supply not only
genetically impoverished, but also more vulnerable to blight. (Peru, which grew
many varieties of potatoes, survived the potato blight much better than
Ireland, which grew only one.)
The mission of
cataloging and saving seeds has fallen mainly to big seed banks and academic
researchers. There are 7.4 million seed samples conserved in professionally
managed seed vaults worldwide; the biggest—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on
an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean—holds seeds for more than 770,000 distinct
plants.
But those
seeds are locked away, not reproducing, waiting for plant scientists or a
planetary food emergency to call them into action. This is why, to their
proponents, seed libraries occupy an important (if still small) role in that
bigger story: They actually bring plants into circulation, town by town,
encouraging local variety and even potentially developing new strains.
“The more
seeds you can get out into the field, the broader the base of conservation,”
says Stephen Brush, a retired ecologist at the University of California Davis.
“In the gene bank, evolution is frozen, there’s no more natural crossing. Seed
[libraries] aren’t meant to replace the gene bank, but to complement it, and
one of their advantages is they contribute to ongoing evolution.”
A few years
ago, there were only a handful of seed banks around the country, including
Richmond Grows in California, which is regarded as the unofficial spiritual
center of the movement. Now there are more than 200, including libraries in
Concord, Groton, and Littleton. They’re often housed in public libraries, but
also sometimes attached to farms, greenhouses, or other local institutions.
The Hampshire
College seed library developed out of a senior project by Hannah Haskell, who
graduated last May. Just before leaving Hampshire, she delivered two boxes
containing 250 kinds of seeds to the library, including many varieties of
beets, broccoli, radishes, and pumpkins. College librarians began lending the
seeds the following November.
They started
slowly, with 12 of the easiest kinds of seeds to grow and return packaged in
small coin envelopes affixed with the same kind of barcodes you find on library
books. The library is still sorting out its lending policy, and in particular
whether borrowers need first to take a class in plant propagation. The
Hampshire librarians know that they’ll lose inventory along the way, and
they’re prepared to live with that. But seeds present another challenge to
librarians: They can come back, but different.
“Self-pollinating”
plants like beans, peas, tomatoes, and lettuce have both male and female parts
in the same flower, so they tend to predictably produce seeds that grow the
exact same kind of plant. But “open-pollinating” plants like squashes and corn
require pollen to travel from one plant to another—and there’s a significant
chance that pollen from some other variety of plant, borne by wind or insect,
will get in and create an unwanted hybrid. Katie Campbell-Nelson, vegetable
extension educator at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that one
year she planted kale too close to collard greens. She saved seeds from that
year’s harvest, and, “The kale I got next year was just this bitter horrible
cross.”
At the Concord
Seed Lending Library, which opened last year, “We only asked people to return
seed on ‘selfers’,” says cofounder Enid Boasberg. Even so, the record wasn’t
great. “Maybe five people [out of around 270] returned seed. This year
hopefully we’ll get more.”
Aside from
helping neighbors grow new varieties of plants, seed libraries can also help
preserve local strains. Rebecca Newburn of Richamond Grows says that her
neighbor had been growing his own variety of Italian heirloom beans for 23
years, and gave some of his seeds to the library after it opened. Similarly,
Boasberg cites what she calls the “Polish Lady Tomato,” whose seeds, she wrote
in an e-mail, had been in the possession of “an elderly Polish lady who had
brought them from the Old Country.” The seeds are now being planted all over
Concord.
Seed libraries
may not shift the trajectory of American agriculture, but over time, boosters
hope, they’ll allow communities to refine seed lines tailored to their regions.
“Through the generations, we’re going to get seeds that are more locally adapted
to grow and thrive in our area,” says Thea Atwood, who runs the Hampshire
College seed library.
Brush
acknowledges that seed libraries are “whimsical,” and unlikely on their own to
reverse the long trends in commercial agriculture. But when it comes to expanding
agricultural diversity, there’s a sense in which every little bit helps. “The
more exchange you get, the more people who have their hands on that seed,” he
says, “the better the seed becomes.”
Kevin Hartnett
writes the Brainiac blog for Ideas. He can be reached at
kshartnett18@gmail.com.
Seed-Sharing Snafu
An editorial from MOTHER EARTH NEWS
Some states
have made it illegal for gardeners and seed libraries to share seeds without a
permit. Rather than imposing laws that uproot the age-old practice of seed
sharing, governments should be nurturing the free exchange of locally adapted
seeds. Seed sharing is an age-old
practice that preserves seed diversity.
Did you know
that in some states informally sharing seeds with your fellow gardeners is illegal?
Hard to believe, but it’s true.
To ensure that
seeds sold to farmers and gardeners are of good quality, every state has laws
that require people who sell seeds to buy a permit and label their seeds with
the variety name, germination percentage, presence of weed seeds, name and
address of supplier, and more. Sounds OK, right? You’ve seen all of that
information on the seed packets you buy. But in some states, seed-labeling laws
define “sell” to include give away, transport, and even “possess with intent to
… give away, or transport.” That’s right — you need a permit from the state to
legally give away seeds.
Minnesota’s
seed law, for example, is so broad that it basically prohibits gardeners from
sharing or giving away seeds unless they buy an annual permit, have the
germination of each seed lot tested, and attach a detailed label to each seed
packet. This law is enforced by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, which
has recently told seed libraries that they can’t distribute free seeds to gardeners
unless they buy a permit and provide detailed labeling, even though the
libraries aren’t selling the seeds. (The penalty for violating this law, by the
way, is a fine of up to $7,500 per day!)
The creation
of seed libraries to facilitate seed sharing and preserve seed diversity has
been spreading, with an estimated 300 libraries now operating nationally.
Officials in several other states are now saying that the libraries can’t give
away or exchange seeds unless they first obtain a permit and comply with the
numerous requirements of the seed-labeling law. Needless to say, these actions
have upset many gardeners who know the value of saving and sharing seeds that
are highly adapted to their local conditions. Regulating seeds that are sold
commercially is one thing, but applying such laws to seeds that are swapped or
given away defies logic, history and common sense.
Neil Thapar,
staff attorney at the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), has reviewed the
laws in more than 30 states so far, and he reports that about 30 percent of
them specify that sharing seeds without a permit is illegal. Almost all the
laws contain vague language that needs to be clarified to explicitly exempt
noncommercial seed-sharing activities, he says.
A national
group, the Association of American Seed Control Officials (AASCO), has produced
what's called the Recommended Uniform State Seed Law. Even this model
legislation appears to require permits for any seeds “transported” within a
state, however.
Saving and
sharing seeds is an age-old practice that should be encouraged. Given the
challenges we face from climate change, we need to promote — not impede — the
distribution of locally adapted farm and garden seeds. This issue may not seem
like a big deal to seed-control officials, but it is a very big deal to
thousands of home gardeners. AASCO should move quickly to revise its model law
to exempt all forms of noncommercial seed sharing and distribution, and should
take the lead in pressing for amendments in each state. In addition, other
states should follow Alabama’s lead — its seed-control law explicitly allows
farmer-to-farmer direct sales of up to $3,000 worth of seeds annually without a
permit.
Hats off to
the librarians and activists who are working to untangle this unfortunate mess.
Saving Seed with Oxiclean
tomatoaddict.blogspot.com
Most old time
growers still save their tomato seeds using the old-fashioned method of
fermenting them. The negatives to this is the amount of time it takes (days)
and the smell. If you have ever had the pleasure of smelling a rotten tomato
than you know what I'm talking about.
I use the
Oxiclean method. Totally safe for the seeds, does not effect germination rates
and takes about 40 minutes. As simple as it gets.
1. Cut your tomatoes and squeeze seeds into a marked
plastic container or cup.
2. Add about equal amound of water.
3. Add 2 Tble. of Oxiclean and stir.
4. Allow to sit for 30 minutes.
5. Before straining stir then pour into fine mesh sieve.
6. Rinse well. Put back into container and fill with
water again. Let sit for 5 min.
7. Pour into sieve again and rinse.
8. Put seed on labled paper plate and allow to dry for 1
week or more. Until dry. Store in jar.
20 Ways You Know You Are Addicted To Vegetable Gardening
www.veggiegardener.com
I will be the
first to admit that I am addicted to vegetable gardening. Over the last few
years, I have caught myself doing things or saying things that has confirmed
that I am a gardening junkie. There are many ways that you can be classified as
a vegetable gardening addict. Here are 20 ways you know you are addicted to
vegetable gardening:
1. You have a stack of seed catalogs on the back of your
toilet.
2. You are confused and feel sorry for someone that does
not garden.
3. You go to stores like Wal Mart or Lowe’s and browse
the garden section in the dead of winter – even when it’s empty.
4. You buy three times as many seedlings than you have
room for.
5. When you drive by an empty lot, you say, “That would
make one nice garden”.
6. While at the nursery, you discover a variety of
tomatoes that you have never seen and buy it because you got to have it.
7. You look for excuses to miss family functions because
you just want to garden.
8. The only channel you ever watch on TV is HGTV.
9. The only websites that you have bookmarked in your
Favorites are gardening sites.
10. You name your pets 'Brandywine' or 'Cajun Delight'.
11. You desperately want to hop over the fence and work
in your neighbor’s garden.
12. You dig through the neighbor's trash to find anything
you can compost.
13. You ask for a new cultivator and floating row covers
for Christmas.
14. You spend more than four hours a day looking at
gardening websites.
15. The only books in your bookcase are gardening books.
16. You carry a copy of The Farmer’s Almanac everywhere
you go.
17. When you are looking at new homes the first thing you
ask the realtor is, “Can we see the backyard?”.
18. You own more gardening gloves than you do socks.
19. While doing laundry you realize your clothes are
dirtier than your kids' clothes.
20. You call your gardening fork your “pride and joy”.
Horti-Culture Corner
By Robert Louis Stevenson
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the
seeds that you plant.”
The OCD Gardener
BY MARI LANE GEWECKE – journalstar.com
From my dining
area window, I can see directly into the trunk and branches of an old silver
maple tree. This is the prime location from which any of the neighboring
squirrels taunt my dogs. The dogs are not the only ones who are taunted.
Dangling from one of the branches, just a few feet from the window glass, is
the cocoon from a bagworm.
The cocoon has
been hanging on the branch for a couple of years, its bagworm inhabitant gone
long ago. Too high to be picked and inaccessible from a window that does not
open, the cocoon mocks me through the glass. Through wind advisories, through
snowstorms, it hangs on.
While the
bagworm cocoon does not occupy all of my waking hours, every time I look out
that window, my eyes land on it, a reminder of a bug that got away. That I care
enough to notice, and be bothered, indicates a tendency toward obsessing about
my garden.
Some might
argue that most gardeners are, to a certain degree, obsessive-compulsive
personalities. While a stereotypical OCD action might be straightening crooked
pictures on the wall – in someone else’s house, at a restaurant, in a
conference facility – an OCD gardener is defined by the Urban Dictionary as:
“That one
person at the end of your block, usually retired, who spends anywhere from 20
to 9,000 hours a week gardening. Symptoms include crying over your begonias,
mowing the lawn 20 hours a week and sneering at the potted plant garden in your
office.”
I know any
number of gardeners who are more than happy to let plants (including plants
that I consider weeds) grow willy nilly in their garden. But I probably know
quite a few more gardeners with a tendency to obsess.
Signs that
you, too, could be an OCD gardener include:
• You have
created a database of all the plants in your garden, including their location
and watering needs.
• During the
winter, magazines and books gather dust, while seed catalogs become dog-eared
from frequent browsing.
• At April’s
Spring Affair preview party, you don’t eat the dinner you paid for because you
are too busy snapping up all the rare plants before somebody else can get them.
• On the way
to the door of an office building during the summer, you stop to pull weeds.
• You also
pull weeds from the joints of driveways and sidewalks … not necessarily YOUR
driveway or sidewalk.
• When mulch
and grass clippings clutter the brick edging of your garden bed, you get out
the broom and sweep it off.
• After
telling your spouse that you are stepping outside for a few minutes to water
the container pots, you end up spending two hours weeding and transplanting.
We can all
find ourselves somewhere in that list. Or is it just me?
Mari Lane
Gewecke is a Master Gardener volunteer, affiliated with the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln campus program, and a self-employed consultant who was
inspired to write this column after seeing a t-shirt that says, “I have CDO. It
is like OCD, but the letters are in alphabetical order like they should be.”
Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds
rootsimple.com
The directions
for seed saving in our last book, Making It, almost got cut. Perhaps we should
have just changed those directions to “Why it’s OK to buy seeds.” The fact is
that it’s not easy to save the seeds of many vegetables thanks to the hard work
of our bee friends.
That being
said, Shannon Carmody of Seed Saver’s Exchange gave a lecture at this year’s
Heirloom Exposition with some tips for ambitious gardeners who want to take up
seed saving. Here’s some of her suggestions:
1. Maintaining
varietal purity Is the vegetable open pollinated or hybrid? Hybrid seeds don’t
produce true to type. You can’t save and regrow the seeds of hybrids, at least
not without a lot of complicated multi-generational outcrossing in order to
create a new variety that produces true to type. [I’ll note that I’m not
anti-hybrid. The increased vigor of hybrids can be advantageous if you’re
having trouble in your garden.]
2. Know how
the vegetable is pollinated It’s much easier to save the seeds of
self-pollinating vegetables such as beans, peas and tomatoes. Remember that
bees can fly for miles–anything pollinated by insects have to be isolated or
caged to prevent cross-pollination. And many vegetables have weedy cousins. Try
to save the seeds of carrots without caging and you may get a carrot/Queen
Anne’s lace hybrid that won’t taste good. And some supposedly self-pollinating
plants such as tomatoes have rogue varieties that can be cross pollinated by
insects.
3. Consider
your climate Bienneals require two years of growth in order to set seeds. If
you live in a cold climate that could be a problem.
4. Population
size Serious plant breeders often plant a minimum of sixty plants so that they
can choose the most vigorous for seed saving. And they’ll often plant just one
variety to reduce the risk of crossing. One way around the population size
requirement is to crowd source the problem and get a bunch of friends to grow
the same vegetable.
5. Space
requirements Some biennials get really
big in the second year. You’ll need to make sure they have space and won’t
shade out other plants.
6. When to
harvest Fruits harvested for seed may need to stay on the plant for a long
time. For example, eggplants that you want to save seed from need to be
harvested well past when they’re still edible.
7. Prepping seeds
In general, seeds harvested when dry, such as lettuce need to be air dried
before storing. Seeds harvested wet, such as watermelons, need to be washed
with water before drying and storing. Tomato seeds need to be fermented in
water for a few days before drying.
8. Storage
Moisture is the enemy of seed storage. Those packs of desiccant that come with
electronic gadgets can be recycled and used in your seed storage boxes.
There’s no shame in buying seeds
If you want
more information about seed saving the bible of the subject is Suzanne
Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed.
No comments:
Post a Comment